History of Childhood

Life in the pen, 1066

Think nothing ever changes?  This is a sweet human-interest story about Wayne Malley, now 58, who remembers the day he got lost at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto when he was five.

Except the story goes on to say that he was one of 356 kids who became lost at the CNE that day, and that one day in 1958 1624 kids went missing. Today: maybe 5 or ten.

In 1966 there was a kind of holding pen where the lost kids were held, weeping and waiting.  Wayne was inside the wire about half an hour before his parents (and five siblings) turned up. “I don’t think we’ve ever had any cases where the parents didn’t eventually show up,” said the woman in charge of comforting the kids in the pen.

Okay, joke about helicopter parents and feral children, and all that.  But there have been some huge societal changes about parenting since the 1960s, no?  Things do not remain the same.

History for kids

Historiann launches a discussion at her blog about books about history as gifts for kids, particularly girl kids. I'm a bit staggered by her correspondent who says how hard this is. I would have thought that in our culture, particularly given the renaissance in books for children that has been afoot the last few decades, any historically literate reader could build great toppling piles of appropriate choices. As indeed most of the commentators do.

Also I'm less surprised, but struck as usual, by the Planet America assumptions even these culturally sensitive and no doubt widely travelled commentators take for granted.  None of them comes up with a non-American title or topic!

I found it pretty easy to come up with a shelf of Canadian titles: Anne or anything by Lucy Maud, the recent Hello Canada and Our Canadian Girl series, anything by Kit Pearson, Shantymen of Cache Creek or the other novels in the Bains series by my friend Bill Freeman, Paul Yee's Tales from Gold Mountain, Afua Cooper's Angelique, and anything by Janet Lunn (not least The Story of Canada I got to write with her). That last seems to be the one nonfiction that comes quickly to mind, but in fact there have been floods of finely written and often beautifully illustrated "information books" on Canadian historical subjects. Here's a pretty terrific list of a hundred Canadian books for kids with quite a bit of historically linked content.

But young Canadian kids (and their parents) I have know are surely exposed as well to many of the American titles in the Historiann lists, and to Little Women and many more American historically-themed books, plus global stories like the Royal Diaries and Cue for Treason, and the Rosemary Sutcliffe novels, and The Diary of Anne Frank, and didn't some guy write a short history of the world just for kids? (And this other guy, E.H. Gombrich wrote A Little History of the World.) Well, it's too easy to list the output of non-American titles -- can American readers really be so sheltered from all these?  I don't think so....

Today in history: a Barnardo Child story

On March 10, 1897 (okay, that was yesterday in history), the Court of Appeal for Ontario heard the appeal of George Speirs of Stisted Township, Ontario (today part of Huntsville) against the local public school trustees.  Spiers had taken in Frederick Hall, a Barnardo child. Barnardo children were British "waifs" recruited to Canada to work as farm labour or domestic servants.

Mostly one reads grim stories of Barnardo children abused, exploited, and neglected by the householders they were placed with. This one is a little different. Spiers wanted young Frederick to go to school. But the school trustees would not let him in. They took shelter behind the statutory provision that in rural areas public schools were open to children whose parents or guardians lived in the school district. A trial judge concluded Spiers, as a Barnardo host, was neither parent or guardian, and so Hall did not qualify.  Spiers appealed that decision.

In the appeal court, Chief Justice George Burton recognized that the probable motive of the school trustees was to keep "these unfortunate waifs" out of their school. But the judges agreed that the language of the statute was clear; it permitted this "terrible injustice," particularly since there was limited space available.  Frederick Hall had no right of access to the public schools.

(24 Ontario Appeal Cases 476, Hall v. Stisted School Trustees, if you happen to be researching Barnardo children.)

Update, same day:  Meanwhile, really today 165 years ago, as Wikipedia notes on its main page today:

1848  Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin became the first Prime Ministers of the Province of Canada to be democratically elected under a system of responsible government.